So I've been thinking, this game seems like a natural fit for asynchronous multiplayer, but the only version of multiplayer that we have has us waiting for our opponents to take their turns.

So to be clear, what I mean is, it would be great it we could have a mode where we don't need to play the game all in one sitting. Where I'll have a list of games where it is my turn and once I take them, the next player gets notified and takes his/her turn when that player is ready. Sort of like words with friends but for wesnoth. When I take my turn, I see what the players did since my previous turn and then do my moves and end turn.

It would make it much easier to have a ladder (I know, there is one, but it's tiny) when you don't have to be online at the same time as anyone else to participate.

I have no idea if this is possible with the game as written though. But what do you all think?

Yeah its been proposed, there were some earlier posts with the keyword PBEM.

My personal opinion is

It's a good idea.

It could be done currently by emailing save files around, but this is not as convenient as words with friends.

If you wanted there to be a convenient implementation, it would probably not be hard to implement but you would need to either tweak the server side code and launch your own server, or do some further development to the "multiplayer bots" feature, so that there would be like a "PBEM bot" which would track the open PBEM games, and you whisper it when you want it to bring up one of your games so you can make a move.

I think either way you need to have some computer somewhere serving either the bot or just a dedicated server for these games.

I think it could be profitable if you made a phone app for this, not sure. You could try to talk to alep or about it, or fork his project to play around with the idea.

Edit: There's also a form of this that Dave suggested in 2003 called "Server-verified games", where as he says, there would be no concept of saving your game, you simply log into the server and play it, and log off when you are done, and the server retains the saves.

iceiceice wrote:You could try to talk to alep or about it, or fork his project to play around with the idea.

Well, I think PBEM support would be great for both Android and PC players.
However, right now I miss the knowledge and understanding of too many parts of BfW code, and I cannot even estimate how long it would take to implement this...

Thinking about just Android devices I'd say that the need of having a wesnothd running locally or remotely, could be a pain for developers and players respectively.
The first solution that came to my mind instead was to have a save file format for PBEM games, containing the savegame, the RNG seed, players email, etc... and a wesnoth command line parameter that starts the PBEM game, loads the file, let the player play its turn, and saves over the file. Gluing that to an email app would be quite easy...

Anyway as I said this is just brainstorming since I'm quite far from even starting to implement...